"OK, Boomer"

Can we still honor our fathers in a revolutionary age?

Over the past few months I have been reflecting at the curious impiety of the contemporary Right—using “piety” in the classical sense to include not just religiosity but “due respect or honor to one’s elders and ancestors.” One expects impiety, of course, from the Left: theirs is a philosophy based on continual revolution, upheaval, and deconstruction, animated since 1787 by attacks on both fatherhood and faith. But conservatism is meant to be characterized not only by respect for tradition, but respect for those who bear it and pass it on—our fathers and grandfathers. Historically it has sought to restrain the universal temptation of the idealistic young to think they can discard the hard-won wisdom of the old.  

Not anymore.

For the past few years, the so-called “New Right” has made much of its hay through unrelenting polemics on “the dead consensus” of Reagan-era conservatism—fully aware that many bearers of that “dead consensus” are still very much alive, but hoping to see them six feet under before too long. If they still show some deference to the grey hairs at conferences, it’s only in hopes of pocketing a share of the inheritance when they finally leave the scene. The mocking phrase “OK, Boomer” sums up the spirit of the new generation, including many young “national conservatives” eager to put Bibles back in schools and Ten Commandments back in the courts—minus, I suppose, those pesky lines about “remembering the hoary head” and “honoring thy father and mother.” In the spaces where the New Right congregates—mostly Twitter Spaces—any admonitions from the former generation are mocked as hopelessly out of touch.

I understand these sentiments well, having felt this temptation keenly myself, before realizing the self-contradiction of blabbing on about “Wisdom” while rolling my eyes at the wisdom of my parents’ generation. I’ve started to gently push back on this patricidal discourse wherever I’ve encountered it, arguing that we can have no credibility in summoning disoriented moderns to the political wisdom of our long-dead forefathers if we cannot respectfully hear out our actual fathers.  But as I’ve reflected more closely on this phenomenon, and begun to have more than a few grey hairs myself, I’ve begun to wonder whether the Zoomers might not have a point.

The problem is this: in every era, the young have had certain epistemic advantages—a fresh perspective, energy and enthusiasm, and an openness to new possibilities—while the old have had others—mature judgment, a much greater store of both personal and factual knowledge, and countless lessons learned at the “school of hard knocks.” Both have needed to listen to one another, but the greater advantages of the old have entitled them to asymmetric respect. Our phrase “tried and true” sums it up: because a society’s elders have simply had time to try more, they probably have more truth. But what if “tried and true” no longer holds? What if that which was previously tried has long since been discarded as obsolete?

The superiority of age, after all, has not held in every past era. In times of revolution, the young rise to leadership, because they have come of age in the new milieu; they understand how the world works under its radical new conditions, and are able to speak and act effectively within it. The old are stuck applying forms of speech and action to contexts where they no longer have meaning and can gain no traction. Like Rip van Winkle stumbling into his home village after the American Revolution, they wonder why everyone is speaking nonsense and treats them like a fool. But what, then, if we were to become stuck in a state of permanent revolution, with technology changing so fast as to render earlier habits and norms irrelevant?

Much of the conflict within the Right today (and indeed within the Left) is between so-called “digital natives” and the analog fossils they are seeking to displace. And, spoiled and self-absorbed though the former may be, they have a point: nearly everything now runs on or through the internet, and they’re the ones who know how to run the internet. They’re the ones who best know its geography—its most effective networks, most reliable sources, its pitfalls for the unwary. They’re the ones who best understand its rhetoric—the gifs, the memes, the irony—and understand how to police its norms. They can effortlessly build a following measured in the tens of thousands while their elders struggle to make their voice heard.

Barba-Kay comments on this phenomenon as well in A Web of Our Own Making:

“The old, on the other hand, have lost their source of natural authority, their claim to respect, since much of their acquired life-wisdom feels irrelevant to new kinds of problems that they barely comprehend….When technology forces cultural changes faster than culture can accommodate them, it is destructive to the possibility of culture itself—since nothing in practice is allowed the time to coalesce, to take shape and adapt. What is meant by ‘human nature’ was a matter of time revealed and preserved: the way things were, have been, and should remain. But where there is no time, there can be no abiding sense of normal—the new now is the normal.”

Now you may assume that I am going to end with some trite version of, “And yet, there is nothing new under the sun. Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear. Age still bears wisdom, and must be heeded. The insights our elders have gleaned through the world events and life disappointments they’ve experienced, the lessons they’ve learned from their own mistakes of youthful rashness, must still be heeded. Though they may not know how to write a killer tweet, they may still know when yours should probably be deleted.”

And well, I suppose I am! For what it’s worth, I’ve generally heeded my own elders on when a tweet should be deleted, and been grateful for it. And it really is the case that less has changed than youth culture likes to pretend—certainly, norms of truth-telling, self-restraint, and mutual respect shouldn’t have to go anywhere just because most communication has moved online. However, I also don’t think this is a problem that can be solved with pious exhortations. It really is the case that much of the traditional wisdom that older generations once had to offer either no longer holds, or at least can no longer find a handhold in an increasingly liquid culture. At the very least, the generations will have to learn to work much harder to listen to one another if wisdom is to be effectively transmitted across such a yawning chasm.

This is a problem I hope to be reflecting upon further in the coming months, so if you have thoughts of your own, please share them in the comments!